Jeremy Helsby, the chief executive of global real estate group Savills, is a believer in China.

He has a big and profitable investment in the country itself and is bullish about Chinese investment in real estate around the globe. The impact of Chinese private investment is clearly felt and the Chinese sovereign fund, CIC, has already made its mark.

The next move, says Helsby, will be the Chinese insurance companies which are now being freed to invest in offshore property. “We have heard rumours in London. I am sure that in a year’s time we will have seen the first acquisition by a Chinese insurance group; in five years’ time, you will have seen several."

Helsby is a long-serving Savills executive – he joined in 1980 and became group CEO in May 2008, just in time for the financial crisis. He was in Sydney recently and, in a wide-ranging interview, he spoke about global property and the challenges for Savills as a global real estate provider.

“The world is beginning to feel the light at the end of the tunnel," Helsby says. “The American giant is waking up and the Chinese fright was overdone."

Europe is still in deep trouble but real estate profits might flow on the Continent this year. “All the opportunity funds are lining up in Europe, trying to buy at 30¢ in the dollar. This year it could happen."

Unlike the rest of Europe, Savills’ home base in the UK has been “incredibly strong", he says. “Everyone is making money in London."

Savills itself has marshalled high net worth Asian investors for a London Prime Residential Development fund and has already bought two properties on the Kings Road.

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Helsby expects more breadth to UK investment sales in 2013. “The funds have been priced out of London by ‘preservation of capital buyers’ who ignore yield. You will start to see slightly riskier assets trade . . . At the moment, it is Bond Street at 4 per cent or nothing."

Savills, capitalised at under £700 million ($1.03 billion) is a lightweight compared with the giants of global real estate – CBRE ($US7.8 billion) or Jones Lang LaSalle ($4.2 billion) but its total return, 49 per cent in the past 12 months, has bettered both.

Savills does not have a big corporate outsourcing business like its rivals; the investment is too costly.

“We have gone for property management," Helsby says. It is cheaper and, in his view, more compatible with traditional brokerage.

Nor does it have a sizeable operation in the US, which provided just 1 per cent of the company’s revenue in the previous half. “It’s on the agenda but it is not easy to do. In the next year or two, I would hope to do something in the States," Helsby says.

Savills has 800 staff in Australia and Auckland who provide about 8-10 per cent of the group’s revenue. Helsby says the figure should be 10-15 per cent. “But Australia is expensive, so it will never be high margin." He acknowledges that Savills has been “late to the party" in local residential project marketing. “It will be an increasingly important part of what we do," he says. “You have to be able to offer residential sales in Sydney."

The reason reflects his view about the importance of Asia and the “massive impact" that private high net worth investors will have on Australian real estate. “You will see more and more of it. As real estate agents, you have to be able to source the buyers and have the product. Asian investors do not distinguish between commercial and residential investments. They want a one-stop shop. That is where we have been strong.

“A private Swiss banker will now tell you that you have to have a London property in your portfolio. We are pretty uniquely placed to handle private wealth. More and more, the top clients will be private wealthy individuals and from Asia. They can be big companies, but it is family money."

When Savills’ full-year results are released next month, it is likely the group will, for the first time in its history, generate more profit from Asia than from its home base in the UK. In the past year, it has opened new offices in Canberra, New Zealand, Taiwan, Thailand and China.

This year it will launch a joint venture in Indonesia and open an office in Malaysia. Savills is aiming to tap domestic activity and increasing international investment from Asia.

“You should be able to harness the global flows and have a strong domestic business," Helsby says.

In China, Savills has 12 offices and 5000 staff and, says Helsby, “we make real money". Its strength, he says, is in property management, a relatively new skill for China and where Savills’ manages more than 1 million square metres of space; in the expansion of inter­national retailers in China such as Apple and Burberry; and in having a strong share of the upper end of sales in Hong Kong.